elfs | Monday's Brain In Bite-Sized Morsels!

"Science leads to killing people.": PZ Meyers brings us a vile, odious little clip of Ben Stein telling Trinity Broadcast that religion celebrates life and science destroys it. I wonder if Ben's ever had smallpox? No? Why is that, Ben?
Ken Hutcherson: Gay Students Deserve No Safety From Harassment or Harm: Even in the Pacific Northwest, we have our purblind vicious idiots. (via Dead Racists Society)
How not to win an election: Celebrate Hitler's Birthday!: Tony Zirkle, Republican candidate running for a seat in Indiana, "Intelligent Design" supporter, and all-round idiot, appeared at an American Nazi Party event to celebrate Hitler's birthdate and while calling it "a great place to witness for his faith," railed against Israel's allowing white women to be taken into sexual slavery. Ah, cool, cool, soothing stupid.
Just some awesome photos.
Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream School: A fascinating, and disheartening, article about a Muslim educator's attempt to create a public school that used Arabic as a foundational language, and how suspicion of anything "Arabic" destroyed her. We can argue about the appropriateness of public money for such an endeavor, but as the article points out there are Spanish-language schools in that district, so it's not the language, it's the guilt-by-association that killed the project.
Is the Singularity a filter?: Nick Bostrom has an interesting article in which he points out that the reason we're not finding other technological life in the galaxy, what we call "The Great Silence," is probably due to some Great Filter on reality that weeds out technologically advanced life forms. This "existential catastrophe" awaits us, we don't know what it is, and will destroy us all.

Or not. Good read for Posthumanists.
It's not immoral to want to be immortal.: Bioethicist Art Caplan talks about living longer, even forever, and points out that arguments against doing so are based on moral standards that are no longer applicable, making a virtue out of a necessity that may no longer be. Great article for Transhumanists. (via about a hundred people)
Death of the Sitcom and Cognitive Capacity: Clay Shirky estimates that the sitcom, and a lack of communications infrastructure in an otherwise affluent and abundant society, narcotized and wasted away 100,000 wikipedias worth of cognitive capacity, or 100 billion hours. An interesting problem for Singularity folks: now what? (via Boing Boing)
What if Microsoft goes hostile against Yahoo!?: A really good article that, among other things, explains proxy takeovers, staggered director boards, and dual-class share structures, stuff I never quite grokked before.